“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth spoke through Jane five times last week. On Monday and Wednesday evenings he furnished material on this book, plus some personal material for us; discoursed at length Tuesday night in ESP class; spoke briefly Friday afternoon to a visiting editor from Time magazine — subject, Freudian psychology; and on Saturday evening talked informally to a group of our friends about daily life in Italy during the time he had been a minor pope in the fourth century a.d. [Reincarnation-wise, Seth had first mentioned his papal experience in an ESP class session in May, 1971. See Chapter Twenty-two of Seth Speaks.]

If — now, a brief innocuous-enough example — you meet an individual often enough and think, “He gives me a pain in the neck,” it is surely no coincidence that you find yourself with a painful neck in future encounters with this person. The suggestion is quite a conscious one, however (emphatically), given by yourself and carried out not symbolically but most practically, most literally. In other words, the conscious mind gives its orders and the inner self carries them out.

Before that time man did believe that he could affect matter and the environment through his thoughts. With the Industrial Revolution, however, even the elements of nature lost their living quality in man’s eyes. They became objects to be categorized, named, torn apart and examined.

You do not dissect a pet cat or dog, so when man began to dissect the universe in those terms he had already lost his sense of love for it. It became soulless for him. Only then could he examine it, you see, without qualm, and without being aware of the living voice that protested (Jane now spoke in a much louder and deeper voice temporarily); and so in his great fascination for what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand the heredity of a flower, say, he forgot what he could [also] learn by smelling a flower, looking at it, watching it be itself.

So he examined “dead nature.” Often he had to kill life in order, he thought, to discover its reality.

You cannot understand what makes things live when you must first rob their life. And so when man learned to categorize, number and dissect nature, he lost its living quality and no longer felt a part of it. To some important extent he denied his heritage, for spirit is born into nature and the soul, and for a time resides in flesh.

Man’s thoughts no longer seemed to have any effect upon nature because in his mind he saw himself apart from it. In an ambiguous fashion, while concentrating upon nature’s exterior aspects in a very conscious manner, he still ended up denying the conscious powers of his own mind. He became blind to the connection between his thoughts and his physical environment and experience.

Nature became then an adversary that he must control. Yet underneath he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because in cutting himself off from it he also cut himself off from using many of his own abilities.

(10:29. Jane had been very well dissociated, with her delivery intense and often fast. She shook her head as she came out of trance. “Wow, was he ever going strong. Boy … I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to talk about tonight, but then I saw that he had one whole block of stuff to get through before he gave us any break….”

There have been tyrannies propagated for various reasons by the race of man upon itself. One of the greatest, however, is the idea that the conscious mind does not have any touch with the fountains of its own being, that it is divorced from nature, and that the individual is therefore at the mercy of unconscious drives over which he has no control.

(Pause at 10:55.) When a man or a woman feels no connection between personal reality and experience and the surrounding world, then he [or she] loses even an animal’s sense of pure competence and belonging. Your beliefs, once more, form your reality, shaping your life and all of its conditions.

(Moreover, she sat waiting for me to finish these notes so that Seth could return. He was ready with some personal data for us, she said, and this would be followed by more book dictation if we stayed up for it.

(Seth did return at 11:35 with some information deleted here. He also gave some unrecorded material during a freer exchange between the two of us; I described this to Jane after the session while it was fresh in my memory. At 11:52 Jane sat quietly, still in trance, while I wrote a few lines. Then she resumed book dictation at 11:55.)